“... the intellectual. But he is also one of the few working American novelists – along with Paul Beatty, Lydia Millet, Mark Leyner, Mark Doten – truly committed to satire. The opening passage of The Ask compares America to a ‘run-down and demented pimp’ slumped in the corner of a pool hall, a novel image of ...”

“... he thought would have this broad knowledge, and went on:I will give a copy of the manuscript to Paul Malliavin as editor of the Journal of Functional Analysis. But there is no certainty that he will consider the paper for publication over the next few months. Each of them will certainly say that it contains material relevant to his special interests. They ...”

“... the pictures. The New York Times was among them, with one on the front page (but discreetly, in a corner, taking second place to the front and centre shot of the Queen Mary 2 arriving in New York harbour), and one inside. But before the Defense Department released its photos, the Seattle Times had published a photograph taken by two Maytag employees loading ...”

“... long poem is continuing its revival, in the hands of younger poets such as Jeffrey Wainwright and Paul Muldoon; there has also recently been the odd case of John Fuller’s The Illusionists, a novel in the stanza of Eugene Onegin which expertly takes on much of the wit, melancholy and technical fluency of Pushkin’s poem. ‘Out for the Elements’ is also ...”

“... perished in the nearby concentration camp. In Pretoria Haggard called in at the cemetery where Oom Paul (Kruger) was buried, along with ‘others I had known’. The diary does not identify these others, but Coan does, and provides a photograph of the memorial to a law officer’s wife by whom Haggard had a short-lived child, Ethel Rider, buried alongside. The ...”

“... only walk-on roles in the Cabinet, while younger recruits to Benn’s Campaign Group, such as Paul Boateng and Dawn Primarolo, have not been allowed to speak in their own voices by Gordon Brown. No one has been more aware of the collapse of the Bennite agenda than Benn himself. His volume of diaries from the 1980s – The End of an Era ...”

“... member of this last group, my sister announced to the committee that its writer had borrowed, via Paul Virilio, a passage from Gaston Bachelard in which a water-bound creature is described as a ‘principle of vertigo’, dying at every instant as it sheds its substance. Melissa argued that the surfer’s symbolic relation to the shark confirmed Virilio’s ...”

“... across Ken Tynan on Fleet Street, hurrying towards the Evening Standard offices, then around the corner in Shoe Lane. I tagged along as he explained, between puffs, that there had been an unfortunate misprint in a piece he had written about Orson Welles. Luckily, he had spotted this in the first edition and now was on his way to ensure it was corrected for ...”

“... attendant pavement cafés had any idea where to find the conceptual art gallery around the next corner. The whole intimidating riverside development felt like a set of dubious quotations trying to live up to the catalogue. Has anybody actually swum in that Sky Pool of unnaturally shimmering water spanning the twin towers? Even residents such as Nadeem ...”

“... perpetually without air, the lid being down, so to speak, a 1912 fragrance sifting to the left corner where we read ‘La Merveille’ and escape. (‘Roses’) Guest died in 2006, and this Collected Poems amasses work from more than 20 books. She also wrote art and poetry criticism, a novel and a biography of the Imagist poet H.D. She became known as a ...”

“... of Joan Henry, an ex-debutante who had been caught passing a forged cheque. Muriel Box’s Street Corner was about women in the police force. The film to which she was most personally committed, however, was The Truth about Women, a feminist comedy inspired by A Room of One’s Own. Woolf, whose influence hangs over several of these lives, argued that privacy ...”

“... but then he’ll snatch it and run off, like a stray cat tossed a scrap which then skulks in a corner to eat it. ‘Le Joujou du pauvre’ goes on to expose something intrinsically disquieting about dolls: the deathly antithesis to life and consciousness that they embody. Baudelaire describes how he once saw a boy who was ‘beau et frais’, primped and ...”

“... and David Garrick set off together to conquer London from Lichfield, or that Emile Zola and Paul Cézanne were once classmates in Aix, but it’s not clear that such coincidences demand joint biographies, let alone overarching hypotheses.Snyder is proper in her scholarship. She is at pains to point out that although only a few blocks separated the homes ...”

“... doesn’t). She loved jazz, but resigned from the Gargoyle Club when she wasn’t allowed in with Paul Robeson. She crossed the Khyber Pass, then closed to women, disguised as a man; became ‘wildly socialistic and revolutionary’ in Paris; campaigned with H.G. Wells against the teaching of patriotic history. One of her students at the LSE testified: ‘At ...”

“... or ‘beautiful new hat’ would win his interest. But it was mainly her literary friendship with Paul Bourget, and her beginnings as an author, with The Greater Inclination (1899) and The Valley of Decision (1902), that achieved this aim. ‘The explanation, of course, was that in that interval I had found myself’: Edith Wharton’s first ...”